Pages

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

And so it begins ... ISGC 2013

Well ISGC2013 has started properly with the opening session in the frankly massive main auditorium.

The session (and conference) began with some opening remarks from my boss Steven Newhouse, the director of EGI.eu, and a welcome from our host for the week Simon Lin. Then it was the back to Steven for a presentation on the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme. As Steven explained sometimes it's difficult for members of the commission to know what the commission's future plan is but he gave a good forecast of what could be coming and what is expected from our community.

What was quite striking is how similar the various programmes being run by both the EC and the NSF are while being subtly different. This really seems to boil down to the long term view from both that these systems are about enabling world class science and research. If they are paying for these large, distributed systems they want it to work for people.

Well that is the week framed for Europe and North America but what about R.O.W.? Well that's why we are here, 4 days and talks from across the globe it's going to be a very interesting week!